This article examines the evidences of moral hazard and the determinants of risk-taking among 500 banks in Central Europe, the Baltic, and Balkan region. We analyze moral hazard incentives and investigate which factors impact the risk profile of the banks in empirical relationships between...

This paper shows that an increase in banks' holdings of domestic sovereign debt decreases the ability of domestic sovereigns to successfully enact bailouts. When sovereigns finance bailouts with newly issued debt and the price of sovereign debt is sensitive to unanticipated debt issues, then...

We develop a quantitative equilibrium model of financial crises to assess the interaction between ex-post interventions in credit markets and the buildup of risk ex ante. During a systemic crisis, bailouts relax balance sheet constraints and mitigate the severity of the recession. Ex ante, the...

The U.S. government appears to be committed to supporting any large bank that gets into trouble. A bailout environment distorts risk assessments. Debt capital flows more readily to large institutions, even inefficient ones, than to small ones. This article proposes reforms to the U.S. financial...

The IMF creates "moral hazard," when it provides bailouts to countries that face a BOP crisis. Two central questions are posed: is moral hazard observable in the data; and, if it is, what is its magnitude? We search for evidence that the unprecedented bailouts of the last decade have changed the...